Kazuichi finds Chiaki and an unusual trigger.

The arcade area turned out to be bigger than it had seemed from the outside. For a mechanist, Kazuichi wasn't much of a gamer. For him, barreling madly in search of the woman he thought could free him from this nightmare of stretched morality and seemingly pre-destined sexual encounters with replicas of his friends, all of the flashing cabinets and buzzing screens were just piling onto his panic. If he couldn't find Chiaki soon, he thought he was going to need an asylum rather than a therapist.

Finding plenty of games but no fun, Kazuichi turned what he was sure had to be the last corner in the place. If she wasn't there, he was out of luck. Kazuichi's face broke out in a filed-tooth grin of relief when he saw Chiaki in that final room. There were no cabinets in this one, which seemed to be something like a reservation-ready party room with a TV and game consoles. In her characteristically off-beat way, the pale-haired woman in the dark green hoodie was ignoring not only the arcade but the private room's entertainment center, as well. She was perched on the couch with her handheld gaming system casting an LED light on her sleepy pink eyes and passive, resting frown. Her legs were tucked up, drawing some attention to the dark green stockings pinching her pleasantly plump thighs.

"Chiaki!" The sweaty new arrival shouted at her, first exuberantly, then desperately. "Chiaki! Chiaki?! Are you ignoring me? I've gotta talk to you right now! I want outta here, you hear me?! I-" Kazuichi finally paused his ranting. "Oh! Oh wait, you're wearing earplugs."

She didn't react, of course, because Kazuichi was right. With her ears occupied, she was totally ignorant of his arrival, lost in her own little handheld world. She didn't look up until Kazuichi was right in front of her, snapping his fingers inches from her face. She pulled out the discrete earbuds and turned to him, failing to rise to his level of excitement. "What's going on, Kazuichi? You look like you saw..." she paused, yawning. "A ghost," she finished, rubbing at her eyes.

"Oh thank God, just the woman I was looking for." Kazuichi had been intending to give Chiaki a piece of his mind about her twisted "therapy game" and what he'd been through, but now that she was in front of him, he felt nothing but relief. "I want outta here right now. We can talk about it later, but for now, I gotta get out."

"Out of the arcade?" Chiaki replied, looking pensive. "Is something wrong?"

"Yeah, something's wrong- I mean, no, not the arcade, this freakin' simulation," Kazuichi corrected her, snapping his fingers at her again as if to hurry her sleepy cadence up. "C'mon, get me out. Log me out, terminate session, whatever you wanna call it. I know you said you can't, but there is no way this is good for my health! Hajime just turned into a chick, and I'm losin' it!! You've gotta have some kinda emergency shutdown or something, right?! I'm goin' nuts!!"

Chiaki only looked more confused, although she still didn't show any strong emotion. "I'm sorry... Is this a movie reference? Maybe? I don't watch a lot of movies..."

"Why are you actin' like you don't know what I'm talkin' about?" he shouted, grabbing her by the shoulders more forcefully than he intended.

She flinched under his grasp, and he thought he saw some unusual emotion cross her big pink eyes. Not fear, not disgust, but something else. It barely registered in her usual blank face. She winced, but when she finally spoke, she was back to normal. "Kazuichi... That game console you're carrying. I've never seen one like it before. Can I hold it? I'll trade you mine."

Kazuichi didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but he nodded, assuming it had something to do with the emergency shutdown of the simulation he was looking for. A roundabout way of doing it, but he'd take what he could get. Idly, he took a look at the retro game Chiaki was playing. She'd paused it in the middle of a cutscene, where the blue-armored protagonist was speaking to a hologram of a labcoat-wearing doctor. He didn't have much interest: he was more interested in Chiaki's staring at the Usami Tablet he passed her. The screen should, supposedly, show only static to the programs of his friends that inhabited this world. The fact that she seemed to be seeing something else there was encouraging.

In the meantime, Chiaki made small talk with unusual quickness. "In this game I'm playing, Megaman X finds a hologram of his creator, Dr. Light. I always thought it was funny... Dr. Light was the one who started everything, in a way. You might think he would create some way to preserve himself so he could help out Megaman X more, if he was going to stick around in capsules and give him weapons, right? But I think maybe Dr. Light knew that hiding away was the only way he could help X protect everyone, and maybe the only way he could survive if the bad guys were looking for him..." She paused, as if to check if Kazuichi was following along with what she was saying. Then, she put a finger to her lip pensively, staring back at the screen. "You don't understand what I'm talking about, I bet..." She sighed, looking strangely depressed about it as she tugged on the strings of her hoodie. "Well, not that it has much to do with you or me right now. I can't fix your game. It's too late," she added in a small voice. "Sorry, Kazuichi. I think it's up to you."

The mechanic swapped consoles again with Chiaki, dumbfounded. Suddenly, a realization hit him. "Oh... Oh yeah. Shit, I just remembered. Chiaki told me there was a fake Chiaki in here, like a dummy placeholder AI of her or somethin'. No wonder-" Before he could finish that thought, he heard a ding from his pad. Hastily, he tried to take a look at what it said.

Before he could, Chiaki leaned over, wrapped her arms around him, and pulled him in close for a hug.

His friend, or the woman who'd once been his friend in another world, took his beanie off to get access to his pink-dyed head and began stroking it, leaving the taller Kazuichi leaning down awkwardly to rest his cheek on Chiaki's ample chest.

This was something similar to what the Chiaki who seemed to oversee this world had done for him earlier, but it felt somehow different. Instead of feeling his sensations dull, like he was drifting off to a **** sleep, or feeling another peak in the rollercoaster of arousal this simulation provided, there was no unnatural effect at all. It felt warm, comfortable, soft, and peaceful. For a simulation, it felt very real.

"Damn, this is awesome... I want a girlfriend," Kazuichi sobbed to himself. Getting comfy, he took a glance at his tablet. "'Chiaki Nanami,'" Kazuichi read in a dull voice, not bothering to converse with the woman caring for him. After all, she was a fake, a simulation. Not the woman he needed to talk to. "'When you give her something, Chiaki will give you a hug and tell you nice things about yourself.'" He looked up into her eyes, waiting for that second part. By this point, he'd gotten a freaky blowjob from a sexed-up version of one friend; he'd gotten to paddle two of his friends' bare asses to his heart's content. After that, he was surprised to find himself feeling tense with anticipation at the promise of a pat and a pep talk.

She looked down at him, her eyebrows creased in spite of the gentle smile she was wearing. "Kazuichi... You're smart. You're talented. You put so much effort into your work and your hobbies. Your inventions shine, even if just for you. You love your friends, and you're loved by them. You have people you care about, and they care about you. When the time came to make a hard choice in the past, you made the right one. Even though you were scared. You have what it takes to make a hard choice again. Even when everything in the world is pressing you towards the easy choice, you can make the hard one. I believe in you, and if you trust your friends, they'll believe in you too. It's not too late. No matter what anyone says, it's not too late. You haven't gone too far. You can still go back to your happy life."

Kazuichi realized he'd started crying at some point... Not just crying, but really dispensing full-on ugly waterworks into the shirt of the woman stroking his head. He felt moisture that wasn't coming from his own eyes or his nose and realized she was crying, too. He didn't fully understand why, either... It felt like a fog had lifted from part of his brain, only to move over to another. He spoke in a pathetic voice, through tears. "You're not just saying that? You mean it? Chiaki...? Wait! Th-this is the therapy, isn't it? This is what all that was for... For this, the real therapy for me, right?"

Chiaki didn't shake her head no or nod it yes. Still wearing that sad smile as the light of a blue screen illuminated the two of them in a dark room, away from everyone else, she let out a ragged breath. "I think this is all I can give you... The only way thing I can do to help. I'm sorry it's not more. Even if you leave here, don't forget what I said, okay? Promise."

"Chiaki... I promised I'd-"

Everything went dark suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown. Kazuichi had a moment to think that it was as if the world had been reset on a game console. Thinking was all he could do: it was like his brain was disconnected from any body, a floating consciousness.

It was terrifying. Kazuichi became keenly aware of how he had been put to sleep before Chiaki's world-shifts before. Forgetting that she'd put him in a world where he thought he was being **** to mind control fake versions of his friends, all he could feel was gratitude that she hadn't decided the best way to treat him was to leave him dumped in this blank nothingness.

Before the world came back on, he heard Chiaki's voice again.

"Ah... Kazuichi! Good, you're still there. Sorry about that. There was some kind of bug in the system... I guess the dummy Chiaki copy wasn't as stable as I thought. The therapy programming for her was glitched out... You probably noticed, right? The trigger wasn't even the one on the list, so it probably stuck out to you that she was all wrong. Don't worry. I reset it. Just a sec, and you'll be good to go."

"Reset it... Yeah." Kazuichi repeated after her. He couldn't tell if his disembodied voice was making noise: after all, he didn't have a tongue to speak with. "Please reset it. You gotta... Please..."

"Hm... You sure seemed eager to have it shut down, earlier. Guess you don't know how good you have it until you lose it. Welp, one restart, coming right up... We'll get you some real therapy. I think the dummy Chiaki will be good for that, at least."

The world booted back up with a brain-sizzling pop.